Tag Archives: neoliberal economics

The Green New Deal (GND) may or may not have much chance as a framework for drafting realistic climate legislation. Not only does a slavishly Trumpist Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, defy Senate tradition and democratic principles to fight any proposal the president does not like. He and his Republican cohorts block anything the Democrats propose, just as they embodied the Congress of No in racist opposition to anything President Obama proposed, even ideas formerly floated by Republicans.

Deep Denial

But an even deeper problem underlies the probable fate of the Green New Deal, even if, perchance, the 2020 elections were to install a Jay Inslee as President and capture the Senate for the Democrats. On the one hand, over 600 organizations, including Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity, and 350.org have signed a letter supporting the framework of the Green New Deal. However, in what may ultimately constitute a greater barrier to rational and necessarily extreme societal action to stave off the most severe consequences of climate chaos, including societal collapse, some of the largest environmental groups have refused to sign the letter supporting the Green New Deal.

Among the refusers, according to The New Republic magazine, were “the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, Mom’s Clean Air Force, Environment America, and the Audubon Society. Two green groups founded by deep-pocketed Democratic celebrities are also absent: Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project and Tom Steyer’s NextGen America.”

Techno-Industrial Culture

Why the resistance from the biggest environmental organizations? In part, these groups object to the exclusion of still unproven carbon-capture technologies from the GND plan. GND exclusion of “market mechanisms” that where tried profited polluting corporations able to manipulate carbon trading but failed to make a dent in carbon emissions, was also a factor. The Sierra Club expressed the need for a more “inclusive process.” Resistance by the non-signers seems to center around what the Green New Deal excludes, such as nuclear power, geoengineering, and market-based mechanisms for trying to limit or sequester carbon emissions.

Here’s the thing. For a long time now, the biggest environmental organizations have depended on the biggest corporations for much of their revenue. These organizations saw financial success by extracting small concessions for big donations. In effect, they were paid off to demand only changes that the corporations considered minor “costs of doing business.” Now they want technologies favoring big corporate interests, included in the GND. The biggest environmental organizations remain captives of the techno-industrial culture.

Most institutions in the U.S. remain captured by the culture of neoliberal economic theory, that is, the ideology of the mainstream economy, which asserts that all good things come from free corporate markets. The climate-denialist and techno-industrial ideologies have infiltrated even philanthropy, to the extent of biasing research funding toward a milder take on the dangers of climate change than demonstrated by hard scientific data.

Resistance to the GND results in part from the fact that the public discourse remains under the control of an ideology that frames the “climate problem” as “fixable” by conventional technologies and market mechanisms that the corporate and financial elites control. That is the stance of the so-called “environmental modernists,” who cling to the dying ideology of technological innovation and free corporate markets as the essence of human progress.

Societal Collapse

There is nothing comfortable about the most precise scientific predictions of climate chaos leading to societal collapse. Nevertheless, with a high degree of certainty, the data show that the self-amplifying processes of system breakdown built into existing and forecasted planetary effects of global warming brought on by the overconsumption inherent in the industrial era. These processes will force the collapse of financial, political, economic, and ecological systems, and finally of society itself, all of which humans depend on for survival and comfort. If we try to hold onto our unsustainable comfort, we will lose the battle for survival.

Collapse is simply outside of the lexicon of big environmental organizations, no less most of the members of Congress or the American population. Nevertheless, the facts of destabilizing changes in climate, global finance, and politics, all foretell an extremely uncomfortable near future approaching human extinction, unless we undertake radical uncompromising climate action now.

Free Trade, Fair Trade, Tariffs, Trade Wars, and all such matters reflect a complex of political-economic issues that will soon become mostly irrelevant. Yet pundits persistently pontificate on their putative principles and pitfalls – within the bubble of business-as-usual.

The problem is that all the parties disputing matters of international trade envision the future as an ideal version of the already fading present. They wallow in utopian dreams of a world that cannot be. They argue over the arrangement of secular deck chairs on the Titanic of endless-growth economics, ignoring the iceberg of Earth-systems transformation just ahead.

Utopian dreams continue in an increasingly dystopian world. “Increase our speed! The Titanic must make headlines when we reach port.” Headlines indeed! There is no port in the emerging geological era of the Anthropocene for grand-scale corporate international trade or today’s global industrial consumerism

Fossil-fueled International Trade

International trade is a very complex system of exchange founded in conditions that no longer exist and assumptions that conflict with the new reality so widely denied or ignored. Corporate utopian dreams promote never-ending economic expansion of the global industrial-consumer economy in a finite world.

We have already exceeded natural limits. Yet economists and politicians continue to routinely deny or ignore them. They try to hold onto the only system they have ever known, as it continues to destabilize the living Earth systems from which it draws its power.

Earth Systems Transformed

The current global system of neo-liberal economic growth at any cost must grow, but it cannot. Like a cancer, it grows until it kills its host, and then must die itself. Neither the dwindling supply of raw materials nor the growing instability of climate and ecological systems can sustain the technosphere much longer. ALL forms of life on the planet, including global political-economic elites, depend on living Earth systems for survival. Yet, we have destroyed the stability of these systems. They remained constant for most of the 11,000 years of the Holocene, allowing humans to “inherit the Earth.” Yet the global industrial system has broken Earth-system stability. The Holocene is over. The Great Acceleration since World War II has rapidly destabilized the entire Earth System.

From the perspective of mainstream (neoliberal) economics, Trump’s arbitrary imposition of tariffs on European allies and Chinese trading partners is rather stupid. It may very well stifle growth and foment a full on global trade war. International capital has begun to run scared. That makes sense from within the assumptions of that system, but that system becomes increasingly unstable as its foundations crumble. So, the establishment critics are right within their bubble, but wrong in the context of global, or I should say, planetary conditions. The very system within which the argument rages is unsustainable.

Trump is wrong to say that starting and winning a trade war is easy. Well, it’s not hard to start if you ignore allies and “competitors” alike. But win or lose, if international trade continues to contribute massive amounts of carbon into the already destabilizing biosphere, then neither trade alliances nor trade wars will matter.

Anthropocene Rising

Clive Hamilton put it clearly in his book, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. The continuation of the global consumer-industrial system beyond natural limits led humanity to cause a deep rupture in the geological evolution of the entire Earth System. Our actions have now propelled the planet into a new geologic era, the Anthropocene, which has already transformed Earth’s living systems and its climate in ways that will intensify for centuries, and likely persist for thousands of years.

Going forward, life on planet Earth will change radically, regardless of the human response to human-caused Earth’s destabilization. We cannot stop the planetary forces we have set in motion. However, we can mitigate the effects of continuing down the path of destruction so many still deny.

To reduce superfluous international trade – even by Trumpist blundering into trade wars that constrict imports and exports – would significantly reduce total planetary carbon emissions. International trade is a major contributor to global warming. Only by transforming the ways humanity relates to living Earth systems – by radically reducing the disruption of ecosystems and climate – can we minimize the damage and perhaps find ways to adapt to the new harsh conditions we now face in the Anthropocene. Doing all the right things, especially for all the right reasons, will be very difficult to achieve.

The stories just keep coming. The NSA and the big corporations have been sweeping up massive amounts of data on all Americans. And of course, most others in the world who are “connected” in some way are being spied upon too. We cannot fail to notice that widespread surveillance has become routine practice in diverse institutions. Less widely discussed are the various means by which public and corporate institutions are collecting large quantities of increasingly detailed information on everyone. “Big Data” is all the buzz where institutional efforts are made to manage everyone’s behavior to control politics and increase profits.

Pervasive police violence upon the most vulnerable populations has become a widely discussed public problem since unarmed black teen Michael Brown’s murder-by-cop. Many instances of excessive or entirely gratuitous “use of force” are now posted on social media every day. The growing split between dominant institutions – whether corporate, government, or militarized police – and the general population, is palpable.

Local law enforcement agencies continue to move toward full militarized weaponry and the “warrior cop” mentality as they more closely align with the DEA, ICE, NSA, the military, et al. Police departments are increasingly populated by violence prone individuals largely incapable of and uninterested in “keeping the peace.” Any civil objection to an institutional injustice is treated like and defined as ‘potentially’ terrorism related. To defend civil liberties is becoming an activity dangerously close to being considered ‘subversive.’ We are fast moving toward becoming a much more closed society, characterized by widespread violent repression of dissent.

Climate chaos is already upon us, yet it is treated in politics as if it were just another issue to be considered later because we don’t really know everything about it yet – no rush. The ever-expanding “terrorism” meme excuses every imaginable abuse of civil liberty and personal information. Little in the way of constitutional rights remains protected from the secret machinations of the “deep state” of “Democracy, Inc.”

The neoliberal economic and “third way” political ideologies both assert endless economic growth as the solution to the catastrophic conditions unbridled growth has created. Despite the failure of that growth to contribute to the pursuit of human happiness, it is touted as both good and inevitable. More and more institutional resources are poured into “big data” collection for use in managing the pseudo-democracy of corporate controlled politics and anti-democratic voter suppression.

In short, it’s all going in the wrong direction. Environmental progress is advertised as carbon emissions continue to grow. A massive turnaround is necessary in the very short term. Yet, corporate and governmental power – whether gestures of environmental concern are made or not – continue on the path of financialized economic growth and extractive capitalism. The necessity to take immediate collective action to slow the accelerating mass extinction is politically ignored. The power elites are not about take the responsibility to initiate the social mobilization necessary to begin the Great Transformation from the doomed carbon economy to an economy that will not destroy the whole earth system.

Only widespread civil collective action will get the attention of the power elites, which continue their exploitative rampage across the planet. They seem hell-bent on continuing on the path toward species extinction beyond the point where mitigation of climate disruption and its catastrophic consequences is no longer possible. The possibility to mount a massive popular uprising demanding the complex techno-economic and social transformation necessary seems unlikely. So, where do we go from here?

Increasingly overt and not entirely polite collective actions to draw attention to the immediacy of the crisis are necessary. But that presents a dilemma. The institutional forces of the status quo are increasingly turning to militarized violence in response to any interference with their exercise of power. There is no question as to where the physical power resides. The people have only one form of power: their numbers. Despite the fact that most people know that something is very wrong, it is extremely difficult for most folks to get the information needed to realize how critical the situation is. Knowledge is power.

Yet, numerous situations of past social transformations and/or revolutions – not merely one group overthrowing another and taking power, but actual rapid structural change – have demonstrated the unstoppable power of large numbers of people united and acting peacefully. The only viable counter to institutional violence is massive non-violent civil disobedience. Of course, the situation today is different than in colonial India or Poland under Soviet domination, or South African apartheid, or various other historical cases. But in nearly every case where the population mobilized for peaceful change, it succeeded. Still, every situation is different and calls for particular tactics and strategies. So, we must find our own way.